His Most Exquisite Conquest. Robyn Donald
quite so … intense before.’
She shrugged, trying to shake off the feeling of exposure she had sensed under those steely-blue eyes, trying not to remember how she had felt in the past. ‘Perhaps he had a hard day.’
‘Nonsense. He thrives on hard work and pressure where lesser mortals crack up and fall by the wayside.’
‘He sounds like a dynamo.’
‘He is.’
‘Even dynamos can break down.’
‘If you think that, then you don’t know King.’
Don’t I? she thought bitterly, but said, ‘Obviously not.’
‘But you will,’ he said, seemingly with some relish. ‘He’s going to be around for a while.’
‘That’s nice.’ She was finding it difficult keeping her voice light, making out that she didn’t care one way or the other, while her insides were screaming with guilt and resentment and a whole heap of worrying doubts over what she was getting herself into.
‘And Rayne …’ About to step inside, keen to escape to her room, Rayne glanced reluctantly over her shoulder as Mitch called to her again. ‘Be nice to him,’ he advised with just a hint of caution. ‘For both our sakes.’
I’ll fall at his feet, shall I? she suggested silently. Like I’m sure every nubile woman he meets probably does!
Her face ached from her forced smile as she got out, ‘Of course,’ aware that she was suddenly in danger of finding herself in way over her head, even as she told herself that she refused to be intimidated by King’s arrival. He might look like the stuff of every woman’s dreams, she accepted grudgingly, as the spacious interior of his father’s summer retreat, which had astounded her with its elegance and luxury ever since she’d been there, now felt as though it was swallowing her up. And if just a compliment from him or the most casual of physical contact—like shaking hands with him, for goodness’ sake!—made her pulse quicken a bit … well … it was only her hormones working, wasn’t it? She was only human, after all! But she’d come to Monaco to try to right the wrong that had been done to her father and she had no intention of letting a man like King—or her uncontrollable hormones—stand in her way!
THE shapes and tones and hues of Monte Carlo took her breath away, as they had been doing every time she’d looked down on them from her bedroom balcony over the past few days. But this morning, with the sun still low enough to have turned the sea to gold and wrapped the distant mountains in a haze of heat, this wakening resort seemed, like her, to be holding its breath, before offering up its vibrant heart to another day of wealth and glamour and total luxury.
Rayne grimaced at the comparison because she hadn’t come to Monaco to indulge herself. But while she was here, she thought, noticing how the trees on the steep ascent of the hillside above the house were touched with the same flame gold as the water in the harbour, then at least she could appreciate the scenery.
The only blot on her immediate horizon, she decided, was King.
She’d been careful before she’d embarked on this trip to do a little research into where he would be, and right now he should have been attending some week-long charity function in New York. After all, King didn’t live here. He had some luxurious pad in London, and she’d heard that he and his father didn’t always see eye to eye.
What he was doing here, she didn’t know, only that it was going to be difficult enough confronting Mitch with who she was and why she was there, but with that six-foot-something of potent manhood thrown into the mix, the prospect was no less than unnerving.
He was hard, ruthless and clever. He was also suspicious, which left her feeling as though every secret she harboured was under threat of being exposed to him, while every feminine cell in her body reacted to his raw sexuality with a strength that left her shocked and ashamed.
She’d thought such wild reactions were the predilection of teenage girls. Because he had affected her then—seven years ago—although he’d scarcely spared more than a passing glance her way. A wheat-blonde, spiky-haired teenager with purple-shadowed eyes and lipstick. An experimental and pathetic Lorri Hardwicke, whose nevertheless deeply buried secret had been an excruciating crush on the firm’s youngest and most dynamic recruit who, not long out of university, was already being primed for directorship.
She had wanted him from the first instant she had nearly collided with him as he was coming out of the office one day when she had been meeting her father for lunch, and from that moment she had woven all sorts of wild fantasies around him.
Young and guileless and between jobs, introduced to him only briefly, she’d jumped at the chance to help out in the office for a couple of weeks when one of the typists was on leave. It had offered her a chance to be near King, after all. But he’d scarcely spoken to her and, like Mitch, he had spent a lot of time out of the office. And when he was there she’d watched him from a painful distance behind her frosted glass partition, imagining a golden future when he would suddenly realise she was there, waiting in the wings for him to notice her, ask her out and initiate her into the sophisticated art of making love. Because with a man like him, she had decided, without any doubt in her fixated young mind, lovemaking would be no less than an art.
Even after she’d left, she still kept hoping. That was until the evening he had come round to the house and shattered all her dreams. Made her hate him with an emotion all the more intense because of what it had replaced.
Bitterly her thoughts drifted back to that night seven years ago. It was just a few weeks after her father had had a row with Mitchell Clayborne and walked away from their partnership—with devastating repercussions.
She had been to the gym and had cycled home in the rain, coming in to hear raised voices, her father’s thin and defensive, King’s deep and inexorable.
‘You’re the thief, Grant Hardwicke! Not my father! Stay away from him. Do I make myself clear? Leave him alone or you’ll have me to deal with!’ It still made her shudder to remember his cruel, icy threat. ‘Believe me, after this you won’t know what hit you if you ever dare show your face at our house or at the office again!’
Towering over Grant Hardwicke, King had been standing in the hallway of the modern detached home her mother had so prized, while her father had seemed to visibly diminish before Rayne’s eyes. His features blanched and strained, she had seen Grant grab the doorframe as though it was too much of an effort to support himself under the weight of the younger man’s hostile and verbal attack.
Soaked to the skin, hair flattened by the rain, she’d flown at King like a drenched sparrow as he’d come striding back across the hall.
‘Don’t you dare hurt my father!’ she’d sobbed, lashing out at him, her flailing fists ineffectual against the impenetrable wall of his body. ‘I’ll kill you first! I will! I’ll kill you!’
‘Calm down, Lorri …’ He had referred to her by name. It was the first time she could remember him using it, much less showing her any attention, but then it had been only to catch her flying wrists and thrust her aside as if she were an unwanted toy. ‘Don’t waste your hysterics and your childish little threats on me,’ he’d warned with particular brutality to her teenage pride. ‘Save them for someone who deserves them,’ he’d snarled savagely. ‘Like your father!’ He had slammed out of the door with his hurtful and puzzling words burning in her ears.
‘It’s about that software, love,’ Grant Hardwicke had breathed brokenly when she had rushed over to him. He’d looked drained and exhausted as she’d helped him onto an easy chair. ‘Mitchell’s saying it’s company property and King’s backing him up. I’m afraid they’re determined to keep it. I’ve lost everything, Lorri. Everything.’ She had never forgotten the desperation